


herald of a new dawn

by inkedinserendipity



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, families and familiars, the lucretia and taako fight + resolution fic you've been waiting for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 13:46:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17684636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkedinserendipity/pseuds/inkedinserendipity
Summary: When Lucretia is five years old, she meets her familiar. At seven, she remakes it; at eight, she remakes it again.Seventy years later it saves her from an unkind world. And a Century after that, it fixes a family that had started to break.





	herald of a new dawn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [everqueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/everqueen/gifts).



> Dedicated to, inspired by and written for the lovely and incredible everqueen (everqueen12 on tumblr)! Her ideas and words inspired this fic, as well as her undying love of Lucretia. Which, honestly? Mood.
> 
> Enjoy! And if you know Kat, or are a part of TFW, drop her some love!

Lucretia is peering avidly at one of her mother’s books, practicing the curl of her fingers around a quill, when her mother knocks softly on her door.

“Come in,” Lucretia calls, setting down the quill gently to make sure that the ink does not spill, because when Lucretia spills ink her mother has to clean it up and Lucretia’s mother works enough as it is.

Lucretia’s mother works every single day, so Lucretia does, too. Whether in her room or at a desk in the very beginnings of her schooling she practices what she has learned: her letters, over and over again. They’re mesmerizing; they’re magic, without the sparks and noises. With swoops and flicks of her pen, Lucretia can tell stories, and share ideas, give gifts.

Letters are little, and powerful. Like her.

“I have a present,” her mother says, softly. Her mother is soft-spoken, so Lucretia is too. Despite the quiet to her mother’s voice people listen when she talks. That part Lucretia is still working on.

Lucretia perks up with interest. “What is it?”

She expects a box, at least a bow. Maybe a ribbon. But instead her mother pulls out from behind her back a small kitten, a shock of pure white. Both she and the kitten smell of something burning, and something sweet.

Lucretia gasps. “Just like my hair!”

“Just like your hair,” says Lucretia’s mother, fondly. She kneels before Lucretia’s small desk and deposits the sleeping kitten onto the wood, which shakes its head fuzzily before blinking up at her, eyes wide and fresh like the sky above, when both suns are out and the blue is all she can see above. Blue is Lucretia’s favorite color.

“I love her,” Lucretia says, and holds out her hand to the cat, which sniffs curiously at it. Then she sneezes, and Lucretia smiles so widely her face begins to ache. “I love her, mom! What’s her name?”

“She has no name yet,” her mother says. “She is a child, like you.”

“Oh,” Lucretia says. Then, “What did you name her?”

Lucretia’s mother smiles, then, a soft and gentle thing that is just as familiar to Lucretia as the scrubbed and faded ink stain splashed along the corner of her little desk, as the contented curl of her toes as she snuggles beneath three blankets at night. “She is not mine to name, Lucretia. She is yours.”

“Oh,” Lucretia says.

“But before you do you should know, Lucretia, that this is no cat.”

Lucretia looks from her mother, to the cat, to her mother again. Surely her mother is playing a trick, but — her mother does not play tricks. Her mother is very honest. “Yes she is.”

That smile again. “She is not. She is what we call a fey, young one. She is a familiar. At the moment she is fragile, but she will grow stronger with you, so you will need to take care of her.” At this Lucretia’s mother pulls out a paper from behind her back and hands it to Lucretia.

Lucretia takes it eagerly, then furrows her brows. There are a lot of big long words on this paper that she doesn’t know yet. She begins to read aloud —  _Find Familiar_ , those words are easy — but words like  _Ritual_ , and  _Instantaneous_ , and  _Brazier,_  she doesn’t know those yet.

“She can become whatever you wish her to become, Lucretia. She is a cat now, but in the future she may be any number of things. When you have mastered the ritual, she will tell you what she likes to be.”

Lucretia looks to the kitten, who is looking back at her, beautiful blue eyes wide. For a long moment there is silence, and then the kitten mewls quietly, and butts her head against Lucretia’s outstretched hand.

Lucretia laughs and runs her fingers between the cat’s ears, reveling in the quiet purr that thrums beneath her care just as much as she adores the dark-white contrast her hands make with the kitten’s fur. They are a good match.

“So?” her mother prompts. “What will you name her?”

“Herald,” Lucretia says decisively. A herald is a sign of good things to come. She likes the name, and she likes those stories the best — the ones where things look bad, and then become much better. She thinks that if she were ever in a story like that, she would want a happy ending, too.

“Harold?”

“No, Herald,” Lucretia corrects, still engrossed in scritching her fingernails along happily quivering fur. “It’s a happy name. I want her to be happy.”

Her mother stands, and when Lucretia looks up she’s smiling. “It’s a good name.”

* * *

Lucretia’s big now. She’s lived through seven winters, and for two of them she had a kitten to take care of, and she took good care of Herald. She’s gotten bigger along with Lucretia; she’s a full-grown cat now, all silken white fur and eager eyes and a streak of mischief that Lucretia is absolutely certain did not come from her.

But she’s still never spoken with her familiar, and she wants to, so she kneels above a circle, smelling of something burning and something sweet, charcoal swept beneath her knees. She’ll have to concentrate for a whole hour, and an hour is a very long time, especially when Lucretia has to focus for  _all_  of it, but she’s done harder things in a whole hour, like fit all of her very big thoughts into three sheets of single-sided paper. Lucretia likes to take her time when she writes, see, and ticking clocks make her stress.

Lucretia closes her eyes, and concentrates. She knows the words by heart as though they were tattooed on the inside of her veins. Her heart pounds and her mouth speaks the words the rhythm makes and it turns out an hour is not so long after all, because when Lucretia opens her eyes Herald is sitting in the center of the circle she’s drawn, head cocked, eyes wide.

Herald meows at her, and butts her head into one of Lucretia’s hand, and a wave of contentment that is not hers sweeps over her, so strong that her eyes prickle.

So a cat Herald stays.

* * *

She is in eight, and nearly halfway done with her schooling. All those hours spent practicing her penmanship have paid off, because she can write with two hands, now, and even more impressive, she can write with both hands at once.

As she’s grown older so has her repertoire of stories and not all of them, she knows, have a happy ending. Some people are just bad people.

Lucretia knows a couple of those.

Some people are dumb and jealous and angry, and Lucretia is very good at what she does, you see, because when she was younger her mother told her she could do whatever she wanted to if she decided to want it bad enough and Lucretia believed her, and she wants to write (and maybe one day make her own stories but — not yet), so she is very good at writing and taking notes and school and some people don’t like her for it.

She’s surrounded by those people, now, halfway through this late afternoon in autumn, when one sun has already set and the second is gasping over the horizon. It’s the hazy sort of gray between darkness and light and Lucretia is rushing home, Herald twining between her feet with a faint impression of chilled paws and an itchy nose a phantom’s breath behind her own, when someone blocks her way.

Three someones, in fact. All of them older than her, and all of them bad people.

“Excuse me,” Lucretia says politely.

They do not move.

“I need to get home,” she says, gentle like her mother is, but unlike her mother, they do not listen.

They call her names and all sorts of foul things and she knows, she  _knows_  it is because they wish they could be like her, she knows it! She knows because her mother said so and her mother is always right! But some of the things they say are true and they hurt because Lucretia knows them to be true and they say them with such hatred, like these parts of Lucretia are  _wrong_ , and bad, and Lucretia doesn’t want to be wrong and bad, she doesn’t want to be one of the bad guys —

“Like this,” one of them snarls, their mouth twisted up into a feral grimace, and plucks Herald up off the ground. “Mangy animal, prancing around school with its nose in the air, well good riddance!” they say, and drop Herald neatly onto their waiting foot.

The moment after the kick connects, the sensation of cold paws and an upset nose disappears, and then the space where Herald was is empty, and even though Herald’s cold fur no longer brushes against her skin Lucretia feels somehow colder.

“You killed her!” Lucretia shrieks, and drops all of her books on the sidewalk. Ink spills from her bag as she rushes forward, fists that she’s only ever used to write cocked in fury, and drains, slowly, between rain-slicked cobblestones.

* * *

Eventually, they lose interest in her.

* * *

Her mother is gentle as she bandages Lucretia’s broken nose, and kind as she sets her finger back right. She can’t even blame the bad people for that one. She doesn’t know how to punch properly, so she broke her own finger on their nose.

Her mother doesn’t need to ask where Herald is, because she’s not by Lucretia’s side, and her mother is a smart woman, and people listen when she talks.

“Mom?” Lucretia asks quietly. “Am I narrow?”

“Narrow?”

“Narrow…” they had said something, and Lucretia hadn’t known what it meant. “Narrow-minded. And they said I was prideful too. Am I?”

Lucretia’s mother binds her finger, carefully silent. Lucretia’s heart sinks. “I’m bad,” she realizes. “I just — a lot of the time I’m right, and most of the time they aren’t, so shouldn’t — I should be…” Lucretia trails off. Because she is right! A lot of the time she knows the answers and it’s not her fault if they don’t understand her when she talks!

But shouldn’t she be trying to help them? Isn’t that what being good is all about, doing nice things for people, even people you don’t even like? Her stories said that was what being good was all about. In her stories, heroes always helped the people that had hurt them, so that they could be good people too.

But Lucretia had tried, she’d tried explaining, even to the nasty people, but she couldn’t do it right and they always looked at her — strangely at first, and then meanly, and now this.

There was something wrong with her.

“I’m bad,” she says again, her eyes stinging. Her eyes sting a lot, because she loves the smell of incense, but this is a bad sort of stinging, the kind that means tears. Bad guys don’t get to cry.

“No,” her mother says, in that quiet way that makes people listen. Lucretia looks up. “You are not bad, Lucretia. You are very smart. You are intuitive, and intelligent, and you apply everything you have to what you do. These are not bad things.”

“But they hate me!”

“Because they cannot do what you can do.”

“But I’m proud,” Lucretia protests. “You didn’t say I wasn’t.”

“You can be,” her mother acknowledges, setting aside her scissors into the pile of healing supplies she’d had prepared before Lucretia had arrived home, crying. “It’s understandable. You’re usually right. But listen to me, Lucretia; one bad turn does not make you a bad person. It is simply that some people disagree with who you are, and let me teach you something, Lucretia: there will  _always_  be people who disagree with who you are. Always. What is important is whether you think they are right, and if they are, whether they are worthy enough to receive your change, and whether you should strive to do better, with or without their help.”

“Even you?”

“Even me,” her mother laughs, that smile blossoming across her face. Despite herself, Lucretia feels a little bit better. “So now, Lucretia: do you think they were right?”

“Yes,” Lucretia says quietly.

“Do they deserve your respect?”

_No_ , Lucretia wants to say, but stops. “I don’t know,” she whispers. “They’re still people, and they can’t — they can’t be all bad if I’m not bad either. I don’t like them but that doesn’t mean I can just ignore them, because that would be mean.”

Her mother’s smile grows, proud. “Very good,” she says, “I am proud of you. That was a very wise thing you said, Lucretia. Every person is deserving of respect. But in this case I think we can agree that they are what adults call  _assholes_  and, should you choose to improve yourself, it will not be for them.”

Lucretia nods firmly. “It will be for me!”

“Exactly!” her mother beams, and takes her hands. Her mother’s hands are always warm, like fire, or a blanket.

“And for you!” Lucretia adds. “Because I want to make you proud.”

“Oh, child,” her mother says, and kisses her softly on the forehead. “You already do.”

* * *

The very next morning her mother presses ten gold pieces into her hand and Lucretia wakes up bright and early in the morning to buy some charcoal, because she’s never gone to school without Herald and she never wants to.

The sun is just rising when she leaves the blacksmith’s, charcoal lugged along behind her in a great tin bucket. It’s heavy, and her arms ache by the time she’s home, but she doesn’t stop in the entrance; she grits her teeth and carries it downstairs, careful not to scatter the charcoal down the steps like so much ink.

She dashes upstairs and grabs incense from her mother’s stash, smelling faintly of fire and faintly sweet, then returns eagerly downstairs, kneeling before a circle she’s drawn a thousand times before.

An hour later the sun is up and Lucretia opens her eyes and before her is a white cat, and all she can see is a blur of fur before she’s tackled backward by four eager paws and a tongue licking at her forehead.

She bursts out laughing and wrestles Herald properly into her arms, uncaring that her laughter is wet as well as joyous. Herald purrs so hard that Lucretia’s arms shake and she tucks her to her chest and presses her cheek against silken fur.

“I missed you,” she whispers to her familiar, her knees scuffed with chalk and her hair streaked with charcoal refuse, and though there are no words she can feel a bone-deep contentment and joy as Herald pushes her nose against Lucretia’s chin and purrs and purrs.

* * *

She’s fifteen when she first hears about the Institute of Planar Research and Exploration.

At first she has no interest. What use does she have for the stars when there are so many on the ground? At fifteen she has little time off, but there are stories to be heard and be told, and Lucretia’s pen is the best microphone of them all.

She writes under a penname, a pseudonym:  _the Lightherald_. It’s pretentious and fancy and exactly the sort of thing that an overeager adult would pick. It’s perfect.

Despite the fake name, however, she’s near-on famous now. It’s a strange sort of fame that leaves Lucretia’s head spinning when she thinks about it; though she began writing articles about the sort of stars that leaves light in the way peoples’ eyes shine as they pass she’s the subject of writings herself. Not many; there is more room for respect in the subject of the biography than its author, but in literary circles her name is a well-respected one.

It astounds her, when she lets herself dwell on it for too long, what a reputation she has built for herself.

But nevertheless, she sets the IPRE from her mind, because she has all the stories she could tell at her feet already, and besides, they’ve been to the stars before.

* * *

“Not precisely,” says the voice of a gnome trying very hard to sound taller than he is. Davenport, as the program had announced him. “This is a mission of exploration, but not of the stars. No; the Starblaster mission will move beyond this world and into another. Quite frankly, we have no idea what we’ll find out there.”

Lucretia sits up at the table, fork clattering against her plate. Another  _world?_  Now that — that is interesting.

The reporter continues with another question and the Captain says “There will be a press conference held in some months’ time, please save your questions for —” and then her mother turns off the radio.

It’s a new device, the gold leaf varnish faded with heavy use over the past few months. It’s not the only technological installment that flooded households as of late. There are whispers, even, of a technology in the works that could show moving  _pictures_.

Months ago that would have seemed a fool’s dream. But years ago the idea of carrying of voices across the continent was a fool’s dream too, so Lucretia’s not sure what will happen.

And that more than anything piques her interest. Though she’s only sixteen years old she’s spent a good chunk of her life with her ear pressed to the ground for earthbreaking news and she’s gotten quite good at finding it.

This — the Starblaster mission, as the Captain had called it — is bound for another  _world_.

This is it.

This is her next big work.

“No,” her mother says, before she can speak.

Lucretia blinks. “What?”

“You’re thinking of applying,” her mother says, quiet and correct as always. “Don’t.”

Lucretia bristles. “Why not?”

“That ship is bound for another world, Lucretia,” her mother says. “We have no idea what you’ll find. It is dangerous.”

“So was covering the raid of the Sunken Terrace, but I did that anyway,” Lucretia points out. “We didn’t know what we’d find then.”

“This is another  _world_. What if there’s no air? What if — what if life cannot exist outside of our world, Lucretia?”

Lucretia hesitates.

“Wait,” her mother counsels, gentle. “If it is truly safe, the mission will return, and you will know it is safe to go. There is plenty to write about in the stars.”

“But someone else will have already gone,” she points out, tapping her fork emphatically against the table. “And I’ll have missed it. That’s the point of reporting, mom, I go to be the first, and if someone else has returned before me then I’ve lost my chance.”

“You have no idea what’s out there! Neither of us do.”

“But the Institute must,” Lucretia counters. “They’ve learned so much recently, mom. I’m sure they know plenty of things they’re not telling us just because — just because they’ve forgotten. They wouldn’t send a crew out somewhere new without telling them —”

“Yes, they would,” her mother insists, her voice sharp. Lucretia recoils. Her mother is never sharp. “No one knows what you will find, Lucretia.  _No one_. Not even — not even me.”

“There’s plenty you don’t know, mom,” Lucretia snaps. “That’s the point of going out and exploring, so that you learn!”

“You have no idea what you’re getting into!”

“And I won’t learn if I don’t  _go!”_

“I forbid it!” her mother cries, knife rattling the table, and Lucretia jumps. Her mother — her mother is  _angry_  with her. Her gentle, kind mother is angry with her. “You may not apply.”

“Fine!” Lucretia snaps, and stands up straight from the table. Herald, who had been watching this with wide, frightened blue eyes, stands with her. “Fine! You know everything anyway, so — so why not this!”

She storms to her room. She punches her own pillow, and her finger twinges, and she cries, and she rants to Herald about how unfair it all is, and Herald curls up by her side and listens with ears pricked to every word.

She goes to sleep angry, because her mother always told her to make important decisions after at least one good night’s sleep, then gets up before the sun has risen and fills out her application at the post office and sends it out before her mother even wakes.

* * *

Her Captain has a mass of red hair tamed stubbornly into neatness and stands like he’s trying to be taller than he is.

There are seven of them in this room. Eight, if you count Herald, which Lucretia does. She’s already started her packing list, and she’s bringing at least fifty gold pieces of incense and charcoal because she refuses to risk Herald missing even a second of this journey. If Lucretia gets to see new worlds, then so does she.

Especially if they find new cultures. New cultures, new civilizations, those mean new stories. Those mean different gods, and different myths of creation, and different ways of life and means of communication and gods, everything will be different, won’t it? All new stories and heroes and things to  _learn_  and Lucretia’s head spins with it, eager and excited and frustrated all at once, because she wants to leave  _now_ , she wants these next two weeks to be done with so that she can see what’s out there.

The human named Magnus has a scrape along his upper lip that swells crimson when he smiles, which he does a lot. It really should be stitched properly, or else it’s going to open again, but it’s rude to point things out like that during a first meeting so Lucretia only smiles the gentle smile she learned from her mother and says  _Hello_  in that same soothing voice and shakes his hand. His hands are large, and strong, but gentle all the same.

Lucretia likes Magnus already.

There are flowers in the dwarf’s hair. Merle, he’d introduced himself. He’d also winked. Lucretia’s not sure what to make of him.

The other human in the room had stuttered through his introductions and honestly Lucretia isn’t wholly sure of his name. Barry, he’d said, or maybe Harry, which would be awkward because sometimes Herald responds to Harry and she doesn’t need her familiar and her colleague sharing a nickname, but certainly she’d heard his last name wrong because she’d thought he’d said  _Bluejeans_  and frankly that’s a ridiculous name.

There are two more. Elves, and twins, from what Lucretia can tell. One of them grins a grin too sharp to be truly kind and shakes her hand with his fingertips. The other has a hand like her mother’s, warm and soft, burning and sweet. Lucretia likes her immediately.

“And this is Herald,” she says, holding up her cat, who meows attentively at her new companions. It’s important for her colleagues to at least get to know her familiar, because if any one of them does something stupid that gets Herald killed she’ll tear into them before bringing her back. “She’s my familiar. She’s also got about ten hit points, so be careful. Please. Thank you.”

“Familiar?” says the elf who shakes hands with his fingernails. He’s looked up from where he’s buffing them with obvious interest. “Fey, celestial or fiend?”

“Fey,” Lucretia says. “She likes to be a cat.”

Something like approval glints in his eyes, and he nods. “Mood,” he says, instead of anything comprehensible, and returns to picking at his fingernails.

“Can I hold her?” his twin asks.

Lucretia’s shaking her head before she really processes the request. Even though Lup has hands like her mother’s, that’s — no one has touched Herald except her mother, ever, and those who’ve tried to hurt her. It’s not that she doesn’t trust these people, but she doesn’t give Herald away easily, unless Herald approaches them first. Which she currently cannot, because Lucretia pulled her protectively back toward her chest at the request.

“Ten hit points,” she says again. “Maybe later.”

* * *

The world ends, and all Lucretia can think is how the last time she saw her mother, her mother had begged her not to go.

Lucretia hadn’t listened.

Narrow-minded, she thinks absently. Prideful. All those years ago she’d said she would change, and she never did.

* * *

She spends the first day writing furiously. It’s best to record events when they’re fresh in your memory, and besides, when she’s focused on splitting her sentences between two different hands she doesn’t have to remember.

She writes everything down. Time bleeds from the sky in the blues of day to bright crimsons and pinks then to darkness, and Herald curls up by her arm and purrs and purrs and, when Lucretia pays her no mind, eventually falls asleep. She should be sad, and Herald is trying to make her sad so that she can make her happy again, but Lucretia doesn’t have time to mourn. She has to write everything down before she forgets.

They are the last of their world.

* * *

A week passes before she leaves her room. One of the twins — Lup, she thinks, for the bright scarlet polish on her nails — brings her food, sometimes, and attempts words of comfort. Lucretia thinks she and her twin don’t have much to miss because as eagerly as Lup tries, her attempts at consoling miss the mark. The closest thing that could come to losing the world for Lup would be to lose her brother, and that has never happened and, it’s clear that if Lup has anything to say about it, it never will.

Finally she’s written everything down. She doesn’t think she’s imagining the relief that flits across her captain’s face when she finally emerges from her room, arms stained to the elbows in ink and grimacing through two knotted wrists, but the expression vanishes as quickly as it appeared into a regulation-straight blank face, and he only nods.

“I wrote it down,” she says, and her voice comes out as a croak. She clears her throat, licks her lips. Herald winds around her ankles and meows insistently until Lucretia picks her up. Herald licks along her elbow, trying to clear the stains of ink, and the huff of laughter that Lucretia manages in return is hardly a fourth of what her familiar is due. “Everything I could remember. If — with your permission, Captain, I would like to pass my work to the crew, and have them add what they remember.”

Her captain studies her for a long, long moment. Lucretia is too tired to quail under his gaze. After a handful of seconds he nods. “I don’t see a problem with that,” he says.

_There are plenty of problems with that_ , she very nearly snaps, because she’s used up half the ink she brought on this journey and two of her notebooks already, and she forgot whiteout so her mistakes and glaring and permanent in the paper. Oh, there are many things wrong, and she’s sure there are things she’s forgotten, and things she couldn’t write about, like the opera she and her mother once saw when she was seven and Lucretia spilled her drink from the balcony and the two of them had ducked into their chairs, giggling like children —

Her throat clamps, and her eyes sting. Herald hisses and belatedly Lucretia realizes that she’s crushing her against her chest. “Sorry,” she whispers, the word strangled. She can feel her face heating. “If that will be all,” she manages in a rush, and hardly stays long enough to receive a nod in return before rushing off to her quarters.

Once there she collapses, curled in on herself as tightly as she can, and for a moment she’s frozen with her hands curled to fists and her eyes squeezed tight and her breath caught in her throat, trying desperately not to cry, trying not to think about the opera or the radio or the way her mother had always smelled of incense and smiled, kind and gentle and loving, and how the last time Lucretia had seen her they had argued and Lucretia was so,  _so_  convinced that she was right —

A sharp keen tears from her before she can stifle it, and then she’s sobbing, curled up against a bedspread that is entirely the wrong color, a faint cream instead of light blue, surrounded by walls blank and untouched by Lucretia’s childhood scribblings and writings, and Lucretia had thought they would be there when they returned, all her ideas and musings for a story of her own one day but now she’ll never see them again because they’re  _gone_ —

From somewhere very far away she hears Herald yowling against her elbow, slamming her face against Lucretia’s arm, and then it’s not a cat’s nose against her elbow but the sharp prick of a beak, and the surprise at the pain is so jarring that Lucretia looks up.

She sees only the flash of black feathers before Herald is a cat again and curls insistently around Lucretia’s face, tail pricked and tickling against her nose and Lucretia sneezes, distracted from her crying.

Herald purrs. Her face is a curl of self-satisfaction as Lucretia reaches for the tissues Lup brought for her nightstand, then fades to concern echoed by a sister sensation pulsing through the core of Lucretia’s chest as Herald nudges her face against Lucretia’s arm.

Lucretia picks her up almost absently, running her fingers between Herald’s ears like she used to do when she was a very small child, when Herald was no larger than her fist with eyes as wide as hers.

Concern and warmth pulse gently along the inside of her stomach, and despite it Lucretia smiles faintly, tears overflowing again as she presses a kiss to the top of her familiar’s head. Herald purrs, encouraging the movement again, and Lucretia buries her face against Herald’s shoulderblades. “I’m okay,” she says, words muffled by silken fur.

Herald barks something oddly similar to a laugh, coupled with a rush of amusement, tinged always with concern, but doesn’t move. “I am,” Lucretia insists. “Just, you know…lost my whole world and all that.” She pauses. “Honestly though, I’m not horribly upset about that part, it’s mostly the — the sort of mother thing that gets me.”

Herald is silent as she always is, a nudge of warmth against her sternum.

“I know,” Lucretia says quietly. “She knew I loved her. I just — I wish I’d told her —” Her voice cracks suddenly and she breaks off, looking away. Because for as much as her mother knows, what if her mother doubted it? They’d argued for months before the Starblaster mission, and Lucretia had said some things she regrets, now, in the clarity of retrospect, and tears spring anew as she thinks of all the things she’d say to her mother now if she had the chance —

A tug on her hair catches her attention. Her familiar has her curled hair tight in her mouth and is pulling her head gently but insistently down, onto a pillow that Herald must have dragged over for her.

The gesture makes her eyes sting, and her breath catches. Part of her is so tired crying but the rest of her knows she’s not nearly done. “Thank you,” she whispers, curling up beneath blankets all the wrong color.

Herald tucks her head underneath Lucretia’s chin, paws skittering for purchase for a moment before finding familiar perches along her clavicle and chest, then curls up, and the waves of relaxation and exhaustion tug her gently to sleep.

* * *

She ends up dedicating a third notebook to the crew’s additions. Despite the grief palpable in the air, the biographer in her is fascinated to see what her crewmates know. There’s much to be learned of a person from the books on their shelves and even more from the books in their heads.

Awkwardness keeps her from pulling out her pocket notebook to take notes on them the first day, but the second, when Taako sets about recording every single recipe he knows, Lup watches over his shoulder calling corrections of temperature and time, Lucretia gives in to temptation and starts taking notes.

Davenport knows enough to fill an arsenal about planes and pilots and ships and command. Magnus can and does go on for hours about dogs, filling pages and pages with poorly-drawn, enthusiastic sketches, and little notes in the margins. Merle fills his with flora and fauna around the world, and also, surprisingly, tomes on philosophy; he’s not read much, but some of the works he quotes make Lucretia’s head spin.

Barry talks about chemistry and biology and everything in-between. Of all of the crew he fills the most pages; diagram after diagram he sketches, labelling everything in a neat hand, from currents to circuitry to chemistry, all outlined in meticulous detail. Even after each of them have handed back their work for Lucretia to bind she flips through his pages with something approaching awe at just how  _much_  this man knows.

Then Lup sidles up and laughs and pulls out a pen of her own, and sets about correcting Barry’s work.

Lucretia would have guessed Barry to be offended at the corrections, or at least jealous, but instead he only looks surprised, and a little bit fond.

* * *

The dwarves of the mushroom world know nothing of cats, and no mask can be procured for Lucretia’s familiar. She burns through half her supply of incense helping Herald take different forms, because surely they would have something —  _something —_

Herald dies a week later. An accident; a door left ajar. Despite Lucretia’s insistent warnings the people of this world aren’t used to this sort of caution, because they are all suited up, each and every one. Now even this vacuum-sealed stronghold that is her home is tainted.

She brings Herald back, sick and nauseous at the empty pit inside her chest without the comfortable warmth of her familiar, and she dies.

Lucretia brings her back, and she dies again. And again, and again.

This time, when she cries, Lup is the one to comb fingers through her hair and hold her to her chest. She smells warm, and sweet.

* * *

No more than three weeks pass before Herald sniffs out the subterranean secret. Through her sensitive paws Lucretia could feel a trembling in her own feet, but she hadn’t known what it meant until one day Herald returned to her bedraggled and shivering, projecting insistent images of a huge heap of scrap metal and robots with glowing eyes and pieces of rebar wielded like staves.

Lucretia wraps her in three scarves, dries her with a spell, then collects her team and dives belowground.

Nine months of deliberation commence, three of which involve the Starblaster crew proving the existence of the entity coming to destroy them all. But in the end it is agreed: half of their people will be taken inside a crystal to be saved, and the other half will stay and fight.

* * *

Like all cats, Herald hates water.

Fortunately several cycles back Lucretia had the opportunity to stock up on incense and charcoal. Perhaps she’s a bit too carefree in the way she lets Herald shift from dolphin to squid to octopus and back, trying each time to find a new way to throw Taako off his surfboard, but Herald is so happy in her new forms, moving with ease through the water, that Lucretia cannot bring herself to regret this use of her precious incense.

Some several dozen cycles in, Lucretia no longer panics to feel another’s hands against her familiar. After wrestling with Taako above the water Herald waits for Lucretia to make her a cat again and she sulks, sullen and sopping, toward the fire, and butts insistently against Lup’s legs until Lup warms her up. Then perhaps she’ll find refuge draped along Magnus’s shoulders, or atop Barry’s head with claws kneaded into his hair, or on rare but increasingly-frequent occasions, curled simply and happily in Davenport’s lap.

Lucretia never told them what it means that she allows them to pet her familiar, even hold her, but she thinks they know anyway.

So no, she can’t regret this use of her material components. It’s another good thing in a year of many good things, and Herald is so happy to bring joy to so many people, and seeing her happy makes Lucretia happy, too.

Besides, now the ship smells of home; burning, and sweet.

* * *

Herald’s fur mottles with rainbow streaks of color, much to Taako’s delight. He takes time off from his philosophy lessons to distract her while she paints, threading thin fingers through smooth fur.

“She’s gorgeous,” Taako says, a smirk curling up the edge of his lips. “Rainbow represent.”

_“Rainbow represent?_ ” Lucretia parrots back archly, focusing on a fine stroke of her brush, then — there. She dips it into a cup of murky brown paint water (one that she’s mistaken before for coffee), and turns to him. He’s got his feet kicked up on her couch and is watching her with that same small grin.

The Conservatory has lent her an apartment, if she could safely call one room with a wall made wholly of windows to let in fresh sunlight and a couch that functions also as a bed a true apartment. It’s big enough for her, but when Taako or Magnus arrive it’s suddenly much smaller, and far more cozy. There’s a pile of wood shreds in the corner of her room that she refuses to clean on principle and that Magnus continues to leave lying around.

“Bite him,” she tells Herald. Herald meows once, then yawns, frustratingly content with Taako running his fingers through her splattered fur.

“You painted her like this.”

“You are just making it  _so much_  worse.”

Honestly Lucretia thinks he takes more breaks from his classes than he truly teaches. It should bother her that Taako’s submission is purely plagiarized, especially when they — especially Lup and Barry — are throwing everything into their submissions, but it’s classically Taako, and she doesn’t mind.

Taako’s that sort, she’s learned. Nothing by halves; if he cares about someone he’d do anything for them, but if he doesn’t, then he could not care less.

Lucretia’s not that way. She’s loyal, sure, but to everyone, in some form or fashion. This whole century has been ripping them apart, slowly, and sometimes she wishes she could be more like him.

Eventually she turns back to painting. Taako keeps right on petting her cat. Herald enjoys the attention, she knows. The highlight of that afternoon is absolutely looking up from her work when sunset light beams amber into her room and finding Taako curled up around Herald, ears pricked in much the same way, asleep and basking in natural warmth.

Later on he wakes, butts his way into the kitchen — if such a small room could even respectably called such — and “whips up” a risotto for dinner, which he brings to her before settling back on her couch like he owns it and digging in.

Eventually he wheedles his way past her work, whipping nail polish out from — somewhere, she’s never sure where — and paints her nails, talking the whole while.

She loves evenings like these.

Herald does, too. The evening comes to a wrap with the two of them leaned against each other, heads pressed together, and Herald stretched contentedly across their laps.

* * *

She brings Herald into the mountain as a bird, in case she and Magnus need to raise any sort of alarm. But there’s nothing harmful in the cave; instead, there are rock walls splattered with the sorts of vibrant blues and purples that Lucretia normally only finds in paint sets, and in polished hollows cratered into the ground, entire galaxies.

No, she realizes, crouching above the faintly-rippling surface of the water; not galaxies, but fish. Jellyfish. Massive ones, as round across three times as she is tall, with tendrils that faintly billow ten times her height beneath the surface of the water. Smaller ones, too, she sees, some no larger than the palm of her hand.

Herald descends onto the rocky surface, then shifts back into a cat. She cocks her head toward the jellyfish, utterly still. Lucretia is too late to notice her stance and jumps when Herald’s paw thwacks against the surface, missing a jellyfish that skitters out of the way just in time, then resumes its graceful swell.

Lucretia grabs Herald by her scruff and yanks her away from the edge. “No,” she says firmly, and sighs when Herald only licks water off her paw smugly. Lucretia pulls a face. None of them can know what’s in that water.

“What are they called?”

Magnus’s face is lit up with all the colors of sunset, and he’s beaming as he looks at her. From behind his back he procures a duck, whittled with the same meticulous precision and care that his woodcraft now carries. “I don’t know,” he whispers, and holds out the duck.

One of the smaller ones bobs vibrantly to the surface, then to Lucretia’s surprise, pops up and out of the water, where it floats, freely suspended in the air. Its tendrils wrap happily around the duck and it coos, staining the wood a deep violet.

“I call him Fisher,” Magnus says.

* * *

Never before has Herald been big.

For a wild moment as Lucretia claps a hand over her mouth she thinks maybe an octopus back on the beach world but she’s never been anything bigger, she’s never  _tried_  to be anything bigger —

A  _clank_  startles Lucretia from her thoughts and her hand gropes around to find a bit of rebar salvaged from the world of the robots. She counts her heartbeats in a desperate attempt to steady them, a rapid  _one-two one-two one-two_  that rushes her ears and drowns everything else out.

When she hears footsteps even over her racing pulse she draws the rebar in one hand and her fist in the other, and as the gnome goes down beneath her hands her finger does not even twinge.

She takes the Starblaster and the Bond engine still whirring bright and Herald, now able to shift forms at will, perched frightened on her shoulder, and drags them away.

* * *

Lucretia  _hates_  this world.

It’s bleak and gray and desolate and utterly empty. Oh, there are people in this world, but they are hateful and cruel and bad, horrible people, and they won’t stop  _fucking chasing her_.

She doesn’t know how to fix a ship. She doesn’t know how to fly a ship. She doesn’t know how to lead, or run, or forage, or cook, or any of this. She keeps the journal of her family’s notes with her at all times and scavenges with Taako and Lup’s instructions and Davenport’s meticulous notes and Merle’s annotation of edible fauna in a desperate bid to stay alive. She has to stay alive. She  _has_  to stay alive, no matter the cost.

Every day she learns more, and every day her enemies learn more about her. She knows what to eat on this hell planet and what to avoid and how to cook it to be at least palatable; how to boil water so that it is safe, even though Lup and Taako could have done the same so much quicker; how to jumpstart an engine, even though Davenport knows his ship like the back of his hand; how to fight, even though Magnus has never taught her more moves than three.

There’s a panel in the engine room where the heat from the Bond engine has softened the metal wall. It sags inward slightly. Every day, as the sun sets bleak and dreary over the horizon, Lucretia takes a chisel to it, marking off another day. Another day. Another day.

Every time the sky clouds to black, Lucretia feels a spark of hope. Bizarrely, when the sun comes out, her spirits sink.

Another day. Another day. Another day.

Sometimes Lucretia feels that Herald is the only thing tethering her to herself. Surely, without her familiar, she would lose herself to fear.

The second time Herald dies in defense of her human, Lucretia realizes she only has fifteen gold worth of incense, and of charcoal, even less.

Lucretia is not religious. If there are any gods in this realm they are the four stone gods that struck her friends down. But when she realizes that, she sinks deliberately to her knees, and prays.

To Pan, first. Then to anyone who would listen.

Then, teetering high in a cold and desolate mountain range, with air so thin her head spins and her eyes sting, she closes her eyes, and recites a spell almost like a song.

* * *

Herald has never been  _big_.

But the mountains around them are cold, and she and Lucretia try a couple different forms before settling on a towering polar bear. For intimidation, they reason, but mostly for warmth, in the bitingly cold winter nights when Lucretia can see not only her breath but the desperate perspiration curling off her skin.

_What if_ , she thinks, on those long winter nights, when the tally marks are many but not nearly enough,  _what if, what if, what if_.

And always Herald sends back images of warmth, and safety, the rock amongst tossed and stormy seas.

* * *

“Shit,” she snarls, a foul word in some language long since lost. No matter how furiously she jams her hand on the button, the Starblaster’s cloaking mechanism still smokes faintly beneath her palm, a cruel mockery of her own labored breaths.

“Shit,” she mutters to herself, almost a sing-song, “shit, shit,  _shit_ , hello, Herald, did you know that this is very not good? This is very not good.”

One thing about mountain air, Lucretia thinks absently as she leafs through her family’s impromptu instruction manual, is that hysteria is always so much closer than it should be. For example, she’s already nearly there.

Herald lumbers up behind her and snuffs into her ear. The warm breath is a welcome relief from the persistent, damning cold; but this is the best way to avoid being seen, so atop a mountain Lucretia stays.

A calm certainty that isn’t hers settles into her stomach and centers her. She closes the book for a moment, a slim finger marking her page, and takes a deep breath. Herald breathes with her. “Right,” she says, when her eyes open. “I can do this.”

Between Davenport’s schematics of the cloaking mechanism and Barry’s notes on wiring and circuitry, Lucretia compiles a list of notes of her own, looking from the control panel and back for two hours before she can make heads or tails of the problem. Something’s come disconnected from ground, and if she pulls the wrong cord she’ll power down the whole ship. Which means everything goes offline — heat, water, air thick enough for her to comfortably breathe, because especially this high in the mountains the air of this world is cruel and parched.

She’s elbow-deep in wires when voices, still muffled from thin air, echo from beneath the Starblaster.

She curses again, venomous now. She tugs back her hair, already slicked gray and filthy with grease, out of her face, and picks up a trusty piece of rebar that has served her well in occasions like these. Her memories of home are vague at best but someone in her family was a monk, she thinks. When Lucretia was little she’d play with sticks just like this, and then, when older, would play-spar with Herald until her palms chafed red.

There’s a practiced ease that is still new to her in the way that she hefts the rebar. The voices get closer quickly; either they’re climbing with Hasted speed or something is catapulting them up here.

Lucretia toggles a side panel of the Starblaster to transparency, peeking outside before letting opacity slam back in. Five of them she could easily see, maybe six; trekking by foot up the mountain toward the plateau on which the Starblaster rests. One was a dragonborn, native to the ice and snow, who was leading the charge. At least one wizard, likely with a specialty in evocation. She saw axes and hammers and oh, gods, they outnumber her six to one.

Herald lumbers up behind her and snuffs, washing her scalp with warmth. Well. Six to two.

She likes those odds much better.

A voice calls “Split up!” and as soon as she hears two distinct sets of footsteps crunching in opposite directions around the Starblaster — she’s locked and sealed all exits so that their seams vanished into the metal, the ship is impenetrable from the outside without significant perception.

But then they could shove the ship off the cliff, and that would be it.

Heart still pounding, white-knuckled around her rebar, Lucretia dissolves a panel and steps out into the wintry cold.

It slaps at her face and stings at her lips, tearing apart the skin. But she shakes it off in favor of slamming down on the head of the nearest one.

The next minutes pass in a flurry of blows and shouting. By now the rest of their party is halfway around the ship and cannot come to their aid which is excellent because Lucretia is not a  _fighter_ , she was not trained for this, but she does have both surprise and desperation on her side.

By the time three forms fall into the snow her head is spinning from a vicious whack to the temple, her arm bleeding, drops of blood sizzling against the ice, and her throat hurts where the chill air has torn at her skin. She needs healing. She doesn’t have a healer.

A trio of voices echo from around the ship, and Lucretia turns to find the rest of the party rushing toward her.

She lifts her rebar and readies herself for their approach.

One of them stays behind. The wizard. Herald, who’d been responsible for one of the fellings during round one of this battle, takes off for them immediately, roaring and slamming massive paws down over their heads.

Earlier Lucretia had missed the bo staff among all the axes and swords she dealt with a mere handful of minutes ago but one of her opponents is a monk; a dwarf, and devilishly fast for her smaller stature. Lucretia’s head, already spinning, hurts trying to track her movements. She lands a hit on Lucretia’s ribcage and Lucretia gasps, falling to one knee in the snow.

She lashes out with a fist, and connects, sending one of them sprawling to the ground, but the monk dodges with ease and slams a foot into her back and sends her face-first into the snow.

“Little girl,” the harsh voice grates, and something blunt prods against her temple, and Lucretia tenses, head spinning with possibility, she cannot die here, “we thank you for your ship.”

The head of the staff leaves her head and Lucretia knows it’s about to connect with her head and at least knock her out if not kill her —

Then there’s a roar, and a startled dwarven yelp, and Lucretia looks up to find Herald pressing the dwarf flat into the snow, razor-sharp teeth flashing. She has just enough time to see the dwarf fall unconscious with a bite missing from her shoulder before a vortex of ice and wind slams into Herald’s shoulder and straight into her heart.

“No,” Lucretia gasps, sympathetic pain flaring up in her ribcage. She stumbles to her feet and in the direction of her familiar, where blood is already spreading red along her white fur — “ _no_ ,” she says again, more emphatically this time, as though she can will it to be true, and were this one of her storybooks perhaps she would be able to rest her head against Herald’s and her wound would stitch back together and they would reboard the ship and Lucretia would fly away but —

But this is not a storybook, and Lucretia is not the hero. Herald’s breath huffs warm against her face one more time, before the soft unfurling clouds that had meant breathing stop entirely.

Lucretia screams. She snatches the bo staff — good, sturdy, polished wood, she’ll have to get Magnus to make her one of these when he gets back — and rushes toward the wizard.

A blow to the head before he can react sends him slumping to his feet. The ice around her ankles freezes and she snarls, lashing out razor-quick to rap at his wrists and break his concentration, and then she’s on him again with a vicious knee to the face and a furious punch to the jaw that misses entirely in her fury.

The wizard looks from her, to the dissolving body of her familiar, to the five bodies scattered around them, and leaps backward off the cliff.

Lucretia screams after him, “ _Coward!”_  because this was his fault, this was  _his fault_ , he and all of them are the reason that Herald is dead and won’t be back until they can find a world with incense or something similar enough that she can use and that could be any number of years.

The thought nearly sends her to her knees but she draws her chest straighter and locks it away. She stands, tucks the staff into a loose rope on her robe. She brushes the hair out of her face, still slicked with grease, and strides to where Herald had fallen.

For a long while, there is only silence. Even harsher than the dampening fall of wet snow is the difficulty Lucretia finds in even breathing. All around her the world turns white and whiter still. Snowfall clambers up her ankles then around her thighs, and on a distant level she realizes that she’s freezing, the sort of chill that reaches into her bones and snaps the marrow, but she doesn’t care. Where her familiar dissolved there’s nothing but a pile of white fur that is quickly covered by gently-falling snow.

Lucretia doesn’t bother with burials. She leaves the five corpses out to rot.

“I’ll see you soon,” she tells Herald softly, and jams the staff into the snow to mark where she had fallen. After a moment’s thought, she tears a strip of red cloth from her cloak, and fastens it to the end jutting out of the snow. It flutters gently in the breeze, stark against a backdrop of pure white.

* * *

“I made it,” she cries, half-laughing, half-sobbing, and falls to her knees alone on the deck of the silver ship that she and her family call home.

* * *

There’s a bowl on the top shelf of the cabinet to the right of their oven. It’s a bowl for cat’s milk, and it’s labelled in golden paint, extravagant lettering that Lup plastered on the twentieth cycle. By some miracle and good faith it has survived these past forty years.

They keep it washed. Not Lucretia; Lucretia hasn’t touched it yet. But the crew does, whenever they do dishes, whenever it grows too dusty for comfort, there in the back corner. The next civilization they come across isn’t advanced enough for a product like incense and the next doesn’t have civilization at all, but every two weeks, like clockwork, the bowl will appear on the drying rack, like any day now it could be used again.

* * *

Five cycles to the day Herald dissipated Taako kicks down her door with a box full of nail polish and a shit-eating grin.

“Spa day,” he declares, and from behind him through the door tumble Magnus, Lup, and Davenport, all with their shoes already kicked off and little cotton wads between their toes.

* * *

The next cycle brings them to a towering city of golden spires and silver streets. There, tucked in a fairy-tale marketplace by a castle so brilliant it paints the skies deep amber, she finds a merchant selling incense.

She’s thankful Taako is there with her to make the actual purchase, because she can’t find the words to explain why the sight of her wares made her burst into tears.

When they return to the ship she finds that he’s bought not the ten-by-ten-gold set of incense she’d asked for but thirty-one instead. 310 gold pieces total.

One he keeps for himself. She takes the stacks and stacks of incense and when she sets them down her hands, and the path they’d taken through the ship besides, smell sweet. “You want a familiar of your own?” she grins — she hasn’t been able to stop grinning since they left that amber-hued city — but Taako shakes his head.

“Cha’boy’s a transmutation wizard,” he says dryly, and maybe seventy-something years ago she would have thought his tone to be sarcastic, or cruel. “What’s the point of messing with transmutation magic if you can’t choose what you wanna make?”

* * *

Turns out the value of incense is determined not by its market price but by its inherent worth. The concept of inherent value is one that Barry and Lup latch onto immediately — what are these things worth, and how do spells determine the value of their components? Is there a time variable to their worth as prices appreciate and depreciate? — but that Lucretia doesn’t care about much at all.

Taako sells her homemade incense for one gold piece a spell. “Family discount,” he tells her with a grin, and winks.

* * *

“We’re going to try out something  _new,_ ” says the female elf, in a sultry voice that makes Lucretia shiver. She tightens her grip on her staff. Even that small movement makes her body, newly aged and frail, creak with protest.

“You see, darling, normally with Body we take something inherent to you — your agility, or your ability to bounce back from injuries. Something debilitating, but not  _too_  horrible.”

She laughs, bright and long, faceless and sourceless. “But we’ve already taken quite a bit from your form, and any more might kill you where you stand! So for you, dear Lucretia, we’ve ruled that out.”

“Thankfully, there’s another option! You know, they say that familiars are just as much a part of you as you yourself.”

The third light above the door winks darkly at her. Lucretia’s mouth has just enough time to fill with bile and hatred before she spits, “No.”

“You didn’t even hear our proposition, dear!”

“I don’t need to. You’re not — “ she tightens her grip on Herald, who growls angrily. “You’re not taking her.”

“Well then,” says the second voice, sounding disappointed. Around her, two columns materialize, headed with three different words. Cam, the sorcerer, looks at her with genuine fear in her eyes. “I do think it’s time for a game!”

* * *

Lucretia rubs her temples with her thumbs. She already has a headache. “No dogs on the moon,” she tells Magnus, dryly, for the fifth time in one month.

“But there’s a cat up here!” he protests, and turns his best puppy-dog eyes on her. They would’ve worked some hundred years ago, but she’s immune now. Not that he knows any of that.

“Cats are smarter than dogs,” Lucretia says, and Herald — who, to Magnus, is nameless — meows self-satisfiedly and twines around his legs.

Magnus frowns down at her, then sighs with a shrug and a smile. “Good kitty,” he says, and pets her all wrong.

* * *

Once upon a time, there was something other than worry in the bond between them. That’s all Herald does these days; worry about her. However she protests wordlessly that she’s fine, that it’s a little stress, that this is only as long as it takes to recover the Relics and then they’ll both have their family back, Herald never believes her.

She never leaves Lucretia’s side. At first Lucretia had protested, because even though she would never kick Herald, long accustomed to Herald walking at her side, another unthinking Bureau employee might. But Herald is stubborn, perhaps just as stubborn as Lucretia herself, and finally Lucretia folds. It’s a common sight, now, to see Madam Director walking the halls of the Bureau late at night, her nameless cat curled up in her arms, nose pressed to the crook of an elbow.

* * *

The three of them don’t recognize her — or her familiar — at all.

* * *

The end of the world comes and goes, and they survive. All of them. Even — even Lup.

Lucretia’s nails are unpainted. They haven’t been painted for twenty years now, and she misses it. Even when Taako would paint her nails a darker navy blue, the flash of color made her smile.

It’s Sunday evening. By now she’s accustomed to the rhythm of these dinners; she doesn’t meet Davenport’s eye. She makes conversation with Barry, as best she can, and tries to talk to a spectral Lup whose constant casual touches are undermined by the fact that she has no solid hands. Taako won’t even look at her.

She’s surrounded by the constant reminders of her mistakes. She could leave, of course. But this — this is her family, so she can’t. Not really.

Finally, she decides that this dinner will be the last of its miserable kind. Whatever happens, she can’t stand all these brittle missed connections. All the moments she’s thought of Taako and stopped her hand halfway to her Stone of Farspeech, remembering suddenly how unwelcome her voice is to him; all the times she’s looked at a recipe and found herself halfway through a list of improvements, read to her as if bored in his voice; all the times she’s looked at her neat, unpainted nails.

She misses him.

So after dessert she hefts Herald into her arms, heart pounding, and looks toward the little garden Merle and Kravitz are coaxing out of the space behind their house and asks, “Walk with me?”

Taako studies her, eyes narrowed and expression utterly unmoved, drying the dishes without so much as a sideways glance. Lucretia’s pulse rushes in her ears, and she  _hates_  this. She hates being nervous around Taako. Taako, who painted her nails. Taako, who learned to make incense for her and her familiar. Taako, who gave her a family discount, decades ago.

“Fine,” he says flatly, and chucks the rag at Magnus’s head.

Even so many months after Story and Song, the full sky of stars brings sharp relief to Lucretia’s throat. Their first minutes walking together are replete with only silence, broken occasionally by the occasional snuffle of Herald’s yawning meow. She’s nervous too, for Lucretia, but doing her best to project calm in Lucretia’s direction. An unfounded confidence, perhaps, but then Lucretia’s always had that in herself.

“I miss you,” she says eventually.

Taako doesn’t so much as flinch. Doesn’t look her way. “Kinda hard not to,” he says. “Cha’boy’s fuckin’ amazing.”

“Yeah,” Lucretia says, and that makes Taako narrow his eyes at her. He’s looking for dishonesty, or sarcasm, but he won’t find any, because Lucretia is being completely honest.

“I’m sorry,” she says, for what feels like the thousandth time. “I fucked up, Taako. I understand that — I understand what I did. And I understand if we can’t — have what we had, but I would like to try to…at least make something new.”

Taako laughs shortly. She’d first heard that laugh some seven months ago and it’s become familiar since. “No you don’t,” he says sharply, and draws to a stop. Lucretia stops too, mostly inadvertent, at the venom in his tone. “You don’t  _understand_  what you did, Lucretia.”

“I do.”

“Oh,  _sure_. Sure, you — you know, you sure as hell  _know_  what you did, but you don’t — you’ve never had your heart ripped out, Lucretia. You’ve never had your whole — I was  _nothing_. For the first week since — I never told you this, did I? I never told you this. For the first week after you  _dropped me off_ ,” he snaps, voice dripping with hatred, “I couldn’t even remember my own name! My own fucking  _name_ , Lucretia! People would ask me what I was called and I would tell them anything from Harry to Marion because I didn’t fucking know!”

“You’re wrong,” she says evenly, standing straighter. “I know exactly what that’s like. Don’t you — ? The cycle with the judges, Taako, they fucking took everything! They took my family from me, and then that damned world took my familiar — ”

“Lup was my heart,” Taako snarls, wild and furious in a way she’s never seen him. She has to stop herself from taking a step back. “And the rest of you were my conscience and every other — every other functioning bit of me. Do you know how thoroughly you  _broke me_ , Lucretia? Do you? Here’s a fucking hint: you don’t! And you don’t get to  _pretend_  to understand because one time you lost your  _pet cat_ — ”

“Herald is not just a pet,” she snaps, her own anger rising. “Herald is part of me, Taako! I didn’t get to see her for  _six years_ , and I lost the rest of you for a whole year! You think that didn’t break me too?”

“Oh, I know it did,” Taako says, voice low and ugly and fists clenched. There’s a faint red arcane glow silhouetting his hair that seems to burn in time with his own seething voice. “I know it did because that changed you, Lucretia. That made you worse. You were prideful and arrogant and close-minded before but after that you had a spine to back it up, and that was the worst fucking thing that could’ve happened to you.”

Lucretia recoils, the words clanging around the inside of her skull. She opens her mouth to retort but can’t find anything to say. In her arms, Herald hisses angrily. “I…” she starts, “I — “

Taako scoffs cruelly, leaning back to cross his arms almost casually over his chest. Lucretia wants to snap back because she’s not the only one in the wrong, not here, but she was prideful and narrow-minded and she always had been and it got her mother killed, all those years ago she said she would change and she  _never did_  —

She grits her teeth against an inadvertent spring of tears, fingers clenched almost painfully in Herald’s fur. Herald, she notices distantly, is yowling at Taako, claws out and digging into Lucretia’s skin, and Lucretia pets her absently, still lost in a torrent of thought and guilt that she buried a hundred years ago and has only just now begun to drown her again. It was her fault, and she left her mother, who must have died thinking Lucretia hated her, and now she’s ripped apart her whole family, her second chance, and he’s right, and that’s the worst part.

When she was younger she thought she was the hero of her own story. She knows now that she’s the villain in everyone else’s.

That thought consumes her, and when she blinks back to awareness, she notices, in order: that she’s crying, that she has been for some time, and that the garden is empty, and Taako has left her to find her own way out.

* * *

That night she lies down to sleep without thinking about much of anything at all. In every direction is something painful, something sensitive; in the past, her mother; in the current moment, her shame; in the future, her family, mending itself without her.

“I’m bad,” she whispers, into the dark and silence, and smiles mirthlessly. As a child, her first guess hit the truth right on the nose.

There’s a quiet  _thump-thump_ , and then Herald stretches her claws, and then screeches in Lucretia’s face.

Lucretia sits bolt upright, heart hammering. “What’s wrong?” she demands, hand going to her staff to cast light throughout the room, but it’s empty, save for her and her familiar.

Herald leaps up onto her shoulder and grabs a mouthful of hair and tugs her head back down to the pillow. Then, human sufficiently laid to rest, she stalks over to Lucretia’s chest and looks down at her with intelligent green eyes, silhouetted with white fur that blends perfectly with Lucretia’s hair.

Herald lowers her chin onto Lucretia’s eyes, and she closes them reflexively. Before Lucretia can open them again Herald presses her little forehead against Lucretia’s and she sees —

_Herself, standing tall over her familiar, arms stretched out to her sides and arched protectively against the small gang of preteens threatening them with sticks and harsh words._

_Herself, Herald curled around her shoulders, defending her thesis with pride._

_Herself, rushing into the Sunken Terrace despite her editor’s warnings, armed with nothing but a notebook and a quill, a notebook on which she’d draft the work that rocketed her to anonymous fame._

_Herself, applying for the Starblaster mission in the middle of the night._

_Her family, looking on in appreciation and awe as she outlines her plan to get the Light, and her own billowing satisfaction, mirrored by Herald’s own, as it works._

_Her mother, then, who kisses Lucretia on the forehead, and bids her good night._

Lucretia startles back up, eyes wide.

Her mother had told her long ago that sometimes people say things they don’t mean when they’re angry, or jealous. That she had to decide whether they were important enough to her to change.

Lucretia takes a deep breath. Prideful, perhaps. No — prideful, yes. Narrow-minded, sometimes.

Bad?

No, she thinks. No, not that.

* * *

Dessert the following Sunday is a skillfully-crafted tiramisu. Afterward it’s complemented by a bottle of wine that Davenport brought as a gift; the wine itself is then complemented by the riveting tale of how exactly Davenport acquired it, which turns out to be raiding a pirate ship and stealing the spoils for himself.

Halfway through the story Herald leaps up onto Taako’s couch, patters gracefully along the cushions, and drapes herself in a familiar curve around Taako’s shoulders.

And then she nips Taako’s ear, a little too hard to be fully playful.

Taako yelps and turns toward Herald with an indignant glare, but Herald only curls contentedly around Taako’s shoulder — it had been one of her favorite perches, during their Century — and nuzzles against his neck.

Taako studies her for a moment, then looks to Lucretia. Lucretia smiles softly at him. Taako looks away, and the tension bleeds out of his shoulders.

As their captain’s story concludes, Lucretia notices for the first time one of Taako’s fingers scratching gently between Herald’s ears.

* * *

“Walk with me?” Taako asks, after most of their family has left.

Herald is still draped around his shoulders. She’s still sleeping, and rumbling softly as she breathes.

“Sure,” Lucretia says.

They take the same route around the garden. But where a week ago Lucretia’s heartbeat was thrumming, her whole body stretched taut with tension, today she is…calm. The silence is not nearly so pressing as it was before.

It reminds her of their Century.

“I hate you,” Taako says. “But I also don’t.”

Lucretia nods. She understands the feeling. “I understand that.”

Taako huffs a sharp breath, and too late Lucretia remembers their earlier conversation, and for a second she tenses, but the exhalation ends on a laugh. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess you would. For the record, I still don’t forgive you. Probably never will.”

“That’s fair. I do get it. The, uh, the whole don’t-like-but-love thing,” Lucretia says, then adds dryly, “like me, with dogs.”

That gets Taako to laugh, just a little more. “Magnus would be so disappointed.”

Just as it was last week the evening is cloudless and starry and she can see them all, all of the constellations they’ve learned on this world to which their captain has put a name, stretching far and full over the horizon. They’re beautiful. Where once she looked to them with worry, now the plump sky is a warm reassurance that this world is here to stay.

That what Lucretia has now, she gets to keep.

“You’re family to me,” Lucretia says, as evenly as she can. “I want — I still care about you. I know we can’t go back to what we had, Taako, but if — if you want to try to…”

“I do,” he says surely, quietly. Around his neck, Herald stirs and stretches, her teeth white and glinting in the moonlight, before she settles back down with a quiet  _mrrp_. “There are gonna be days when I hate your guts. Fair warning.”

“Consider me warned,” she says, unable to help the upward quirk of her lips.

Taako grins back, a small, brief thing. “I miss you too,” he says, then.

Lucretia’s eyes sting. She laughs at herself, dabs at her eyes with her sleeve. “Damn it,” she says. “Making me cry.”

They resume their ambling circuit around the garden. Kravitz has done an excellent job with the place; flowers of all colors sprout even in the thickening dark of a descending winter. Ribs of marigolds sprout through with bright clusters of forget-me-nots, even a batch or roses or two to accentuate the mossy roots of an old willow tree. The fronds tickle Herald’s back as she stretches, then turns to contentedly lick Taako’s jaw.

“Kravitz has done well.”

Taako smiles softly at the words. “Yeah,” he says. He kneels, plucks a forget-me-not from the ground. After a moment’s consideration, he tucks it into his braid, and wordlessly, they continue their route. “He sure has. Merle had to — Merle put in a good word with his god, did you know? Pan. Get him to stop killing everything Krav touched. Which is kinda hypocritical since  _technically_  Mags was the one that got his arm, but whatever.” Taako shrugs. “Old goat’s sorta protective of him.”

“He’s not the only one,” Lucretia says, thinking of Davenport, and strangely enough, the Hunger. There was a solemn silence that stretched for minutes after Merle recounted his final Parley. “Our healer is something of a hot commodity.”

“It’s not  _fair,_ ” Taako gripes. “Fuckin’ — old crusty-ass Kenny Chesney-tattooed beach dwarf has all these dudes following him around whenever he goes to the beach? Horseshit! Cha’boy’s not a day over two hundred and hot as  _hell_  and they go after  _him?_ Really?”

Lucretia laughs, so hard she claps a hand over her mouth. “You seem happily arranged where you are,” she points out, laughter threading through her words, and Taako glowers at her.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m fuckin’  _delighted_ ,” he growls, “y’know, with — with Krav and the house and everything, but that’s not the  _point_ , Lucretia, it’s the hit to the ol’ Taako pride! Merle looks like he just stepped outta the bottom of the ocean with his horrible hair and  _he_ gets all the dudes following him around? It’s horrible!”

“Horrible,” she agrees solemnly, swallowing gales of laughter as best she can — and tears, too. She’d missed Taako’s fruitless, faux-anger tirades just as much as she’d missed his jokes and his recipes and the quiet way he’d open up after hours of sitting in contemplative silence.

She’d missed him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, after a long beat of silence. “Kinda. Fuck you, still. Mostly. But also I shouldn’t have — shouldn’t have told you you were better off without a spine or — or whatever.”

Lucretia blinks at him in surprise. She isn’t quick enough to get in a word before he snaps, “Yeah I fuckin’ talked to Lup about this, fuck off.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were thinking about it.”

She politely hides a smile at his persistent irritation. Joy wells up in her, rough and comfortable, just at the thought of being able to be  _around_  Taako again. No more silence. No more lengthy pauses.

There will be anger. Anger, and grief, and tears, she’s sure, but — but now they will mend.

“I’m pretty prideful,” she concedes. “Narrow-minded, too. Some might say. You know, you and my mother both.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m glad you could see the third option.”

There’s a long beat of silence. Herald’s tail swishes audibly behind his back, and she looks to the comfortable, curled form of her familiar before finally meeting Taako’s gaze. “What?”

“You miss our homeworld.”

Lucretia shrugs. “I miss my mother,” she says. “But I’m happy with the world we have now. Why?”

“Nothing,” he says, then, “Lup and Barry are working on something.”

“What is it?”

Taako shrugs. “Ask Barry,” he says. “He’d love to talk to you about it.”

Lucretia stares at him, surprised. Barry — Barry hasn’t wanted to talk to her about much of anything since their family recovered their memories. That Barry would want to talk to her about anything, and that Taako would know that, means that Taako talked to Barry about Lucretia, and they must have — they must have come to a resolution, and a positive one, about her.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you, Taako.”

He looks so uncomfortable that she has to smile. “Whatever,” he says. “What’s family for, anyway?”

She’s grinning too wide and too overjoyed to answer. Taako rolls his eyes at her, good-natured, and runs a finger along Herald’s back. Herald purrs in response, contentment and joy radiating off of her in warm waves.

“Your human’s leaking,” he informs Herald with a good-natured roll of his eyes. Then, to Lucretia, “Come on inside. I got a spa day set up. You gotta buy the supplies, of course,” he says, “but for you, I can probably chip off a family discount.”


End file.
